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Shoes at Gettysburg

One of the most persistent legends surrounding the Battle of
Gettysburg (1863), which took place during the American Civil
War (1861–1865), is that it was fought over shoes. Ten weeks after the battle, Confederate general
Henry Heth, a Virginian whose troops were the first to engage on
July 1, filed a now-famous report in which he explained why he had sent a portion of his division into the
small Pennsylvania town. "On the morning of June 30," Heth wrote, "I ordered Brigadier General [Johnston]
Pettigrew to take his brigade to Gettysburg, search the town for army supplies (shoes especially), and return
the same day." That parenthetical phrase "shoes especially" has taken on a life of its own over the years. A
1997 newsletter of the American Podiatric Medical Association is typical—it claimed, perhaps due to its
interest in foot health, that footwear was the battle's causa belli, adding, "There was
a warehouse full of boots and shoes in the town." MORE...

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So what are the real reasons for the battle? There is no question that the Union and Confederate armies
collided unexpectedly at Gettysburg (in what, in military terms, is called a "meeting engagement"). It is also
true that Heth's men—indeed, much of the Army of Northern
Virginia—were short on shoes. A rumor had even been circulating that shoes were to be found in
Gettysburg, despite the fact that Jubal A. Early's men had been
through the town a few days earlier, demanded a ransom that included 1,500 pairs of shoes, and come away
empty-handed. It is not true, however, that there was a shoe warehouse or shoe factory
in Gettysburg—only a carriage factory, a college, and a finishing school for girls. Finally, shoes were only
part of the reason that Heth's men, in his own words, "stumbled into this fight" on
July 1.

True, the army was footsore; but, more importantly—figuratively speaking—it was also blind. Confederate
cavalry under J. E. B. Stuart had been missing for almost a week
on a long ride around the Union army. As a result, Heth and his boss, A.
P. Hill, had no idea what was in front of them. (Cavalry, not infantry, were the eyes and ears of an
army. They were used both to gather intelligence about the enemy and to shield one's own movements.) After
Pettigrew encountered Union troopers on June 30, Hill sent Heth back to Gettysburg the next day to
reconnoiter. His mission: to find out whether the soldiers in town were harmless home guard troops or the more
fearsome Army of the Potomac. Heth was not supposed to start a
battle; in fact, he was under specific orders from Robert E. Lee
not to do so. The Virginian—new to his command and an old favorite of Lee's—started one anyway, a "reckless
act," according to historian Stephen W. Sears, and perhaps even an insubordinate one.

Nothing about war is simple, of course, and in the same way that Heth stumbled into battle, one can also
stumble into a fierce historical argument. Heth's decisions were angrily debated by so-called Lost Cause historians after the war, part of a larger, often very
personal battle over who was to blame for Gettysburg—Lee, Stuart, or James Longstreet. (That these battles were largely fought by Virginians over the actions of other
Virginians made them all the more personal.) In a defense of Stuart, fellow cavalryman John Singleton Mosby wrote in 1908 that Heth and Hill were not interested in shoes at all, but
in battle, glory, and prisoners. Lee's army was never blind, he claimed, and only selfishness and perfidy led
to battle. "If Hill and Heth had stood still," Mosby wrote, "they would not have stumbled."

Why, then, the focus on shoes? For some early historians, it may have been a sleight of hand, a way of
distracting readers from more prickly questions surrounding the Confederate defeat. Besides that, the largely
accurate, if sometimes exaggerated, image of shoeless soldiers conveniently underscored the Lost Cause notion
of nobility achieved through suffering. By calling attention to the ragged state of Johnny Reb, these writers
also called attention to how the Confederate army, time and again, had managed to triumph in battle without
nearly the numbers or materiel of its adversary. Such a state of affairs could not last forever, of course;
Gettysburg was proof of that. And while no one argued that Lee lost the battle because his men did not have
enough shoes, the image speaks for itself.

Finally, from a literary standpoint, "shoes especially" represents the perfect detail, quickly translating
abstract historical forces into blisters on aching feet and the smell of new shoe leather. The Battle of
Gettysburg readily lends itself to being read as a three-act tragedy, dominated, as many have argued, by Lee's
hubris. ("The fundamental fault that disfigured his conduct of the campaign," historian Brian Holden Reid has
written, "was that Lee was overly confident and expected too much of his marvelous troops.") That it started
by accident, over something so "pedestrian" as shoes, is too perfect for writers to ignore. Shelby Foote
certainly did not, crafting a scene in The Civil War: A Narrative (1963) in which A. P.
Hill airily dismissed the possibility that the Army of the Potomac was in Gettysburg:

In Foote's dialogue, Heth was quick to take him up on that. "If there is no objection," he said, "I will take
my division tomorrow and go to Gettysburg and get those shoes."